Mr. John McDonnell:

The amount that was sold to NAMA was at effectively fair value, and that's a very different value. And as we know now that, when the loans were sold to NAMA, it was at the effective ... it was at the bottom end of the cycle, so therefore the fair value of those loans was a very different amount to the impaired value of those loans. They're calculated very differently.

And lastly, under IAS 39, the bank were not allowed to account for these loans at fair value, so they couldn't write them down to fair value and they could only book the additional loss when the loans were transferred to NAMA. Bank of Ireland were very aware of that and, in their December 2009 accounts, disclosed that they expected to take quite a substantial additional losses on the loans transferred to NAMA as a result of this calculation difference.